Fake Falling in Love

I wrote a novella a little while back and I just started typing it out and editing it. This is how it starts.




Fake Falling in Love

December 20 - 2007

The sleep that I've missed since she's been back is well worth the pain that seeps into the back sides of my eye balls.
Today a pretty girl stood me up. Or maybe just disappeared for a bit. I should have known better and saw it coming. This is the reason why I stopped talking to her in the first place.
She would be extremely sweet to me for a period of time then without warning or reason she would neglect me. She'd not answer my calls and not call me and I wouldn't see or hear from her for a long time.

Anyway- This is the story of me and Marie.

The very first night that I met her she had me hooked. I was living in Warren Michigan at the time with a few of my friends. I worked the night-shift at an all night diner in the neighboring town where I grew up called Hazel Park. It was around this period of my life that I started frequenting a restaurant called National Coney Island to get away from the restaurant I worked in. Even though I worked at a restaurant and got comped on a lot of the food I'd eat there, I would literally wake up in the evening, drive 5 miles to eat dinner at National then drive 5 miles to my place of work when I finished.
National Coney Island was a chilli dog and milk shake joint that was fairly cheap and had a wait staff that was friendly in the most honest of ways. They waitress would ask how you're doing, and you'd say fine and ask her the same thing and she'd say, "Shitty. Tired. And I don't want to be here."
I was very fond of that. It was that attitude along with the women who held it that sparked my very unhealthy addiction of paying girls to be nice to me through the form of coffee drinking and tipping well. As an aside, I am currently at National right now, writing down theses old thoughts and explanations nearly four years after I met Marie.

It was nearly on accident, or coincidence how Marie and I met. Then again if you analyze and break down anything enough you can write it off a coincidence. No matter.
It was any normal late evening of that year and my friend Jason and I were hungry so we went up to the Coney Island. As we exited my truck and headed toward the double doors two young girls were heading to the same doors from another side of the parking lot. I forget which one of us held the door open for the girls, but one of the girls, namely Marie returned the favor and held the second set of doors for Jason and I. Because of this, the four of us were all approaching the "PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED" sign at the same time. Those few awkward steps and collective dance from the door to the sign was short lived for J and I breezed right past the sign while our female cha-cha partners we're left on the dance floor.
During the dance there were many exchanged glances between us four. Marie was wide eyed and seemed to be animalistally darting from one place to the next as opposed to walking.
I pretended not to notice or care, for culture at this point had taught me that to be cool was to be apathetic and reckless in the same breath. I had just turned twenty and thought that being a calm, pseudo-thoughtful, liberal, atheist was ground breaking shit; not to mention I was growing a huge beard in protest of societies standards as well as being newly broken hearted off my high school and beyond sweetie of 5 years.
Secretly though, I was hooked.

Jason and I sat down and talked in depth of what just happened using mostly facial expressions and little dialog. The girls were still standing by the sign: waiting to be seated.
"Pretty girls, eh?" Jason said after a few seconds of discussing what had just occurred with out the aid of spoken language.
"Oh yeah," I said sounding sarcastic but being very serious. "Real pretty," I continued.
"Pretty girls man," he said again, this time with a slight sigh of relief.

It should be said that for whatever reason Jason and I worked fairly hard at not being in situations that involved pretty girls that we didn't know personally. The half minute cha-cha and hard looks we experienced at the door was enough for us to run home after dinner and tell everyone we talked to about the situation. Gloating over the smallest contact.
Perhaps being raised in a podunk suburb town that all the surrounding towns spit upon verbally, metaphorically, and otherwise had forced us into a walled off disassociation from anyone who wasn't from Hazel Park. Yet this feeling of segregation gave us strange pride. The urge to belong, to be liked and recognized was lost because somehow the feeling of being below everyone else made us see ourselves as above the rest of the world.